Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Could I have a Trump sandwich with a side of Soros, please?

Donald Trump has attacked Ted Cruz roughly a billion times over the last week for having taken out loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Like most everything Trump says, his attacks are short on facts and even shorter on sense. He claims somehow that Cruz attempted to hide the loans, even though he openly disclosed them on public filings (just not the right ones).

On the other hand, Trump definitely can be bought and he most certainly does owe large amounts of money to some rather suspicious and nefarious people.

The Trump International Hotel and Tower, also known as Trump Tower Chicago and Trump Tower, is a skyscraper condo-hotel in downtown Chicago, Illinois.

The demolition and construction were financed by a 650-million-dollar loan from Deutsche Bank and a trio of hedge fund investors who represented George Soros as one of their sources of funds according to The Chicago Tribune.

The contribution by George Soros is a $160 million investment, in the form of a mezzanine loan, a kind of second mortgage that typically charges a much higher interest rate than a first-mortgage construction loan.

He’s made the nonsensical claim repeatedly that Ted Cruz can’t “protect people” from Citibank or Goldman Sachs or whoever, because he has taken out loans from them or personally guaranteed loans to his campaign from them.

I don’t know, I don’t feel like I have ever needed protection from Citibank or Goldman Sachs, but I digress. Because if that claim is true about Ted Cruz, it is also true about Donald Trump. I mean, of course it is. There is absolutely no way that a guy who has spent his life as a real estate mogul has not at one time taken out huge, major loans from every major investment bank in the country.

Donald Trump is “owned” by almost literally everyone according to his most recent financial disclosures. He has billions (with a “B”) of dollars of outstanding loans from virtually every major Wall Street bank, including Capital One, Deutsche Bank, ISB, UBS, and Merrill Lynch.

There is essentially not a major Wall Street entity that Donald Trump or his companies have not taken out loans from or received financing from. In fact, that’s more or less his entire business model.
If Ted Cruz is owned by Citibank and Goldman Sachs just because he once took out a loan from them, then what that means is that he is owned by a several fewer banks than Donald Trump is.

The question was… can Trump be bought?

My answer is... very much so -- and he already is.

As far as the idiotic criticism regarding TPP, Cruz actually voted against the TPP. He did vote to fast track it during the negotiation phase, based upon assurances he received, which weakened Congress' ability to stop it later when the final product came out. He acknowledged this was a mistake, which led to his calling McConnell a liar on the Senate Floor.

You can argue that trusting McConnell and Obama's assurances on anything was dumb based on their track records. But Cruz does have a track record both of conservatism and doing what he says he'll do when he runs for office. And while others have cozied up to the left wing media and establishment GOP, Cruz has consistently confronted them at every turn, which is why they dislike him so much.